In last week’s Onchain Pulse #1, we flagged one specific metric to watch as the signal that short-term selling pressure had finally cleared: SOPR crossing back above 1.0. On February 16th, it happened. Short-Term Holder SOPR crossed above 1.0 for the first time in a week, meaning the average coin being spent on the Bitcoin network was once again changing hands at a profit.
But what exactly is STH-SOPR, why does the 1.0 level matter so much, and how do you use it in practice? This article breaks it down from first principles — no jargon, no assumptions about prior knowledge.
Starting With SOPR: The Foundation
Before understanding STH-SOPR, you need to understand the base metric it comes from: SOPR — the Spent Output Profit Ratio.
Every time Bitcoin moves from one wallet to another, it creates what’s called a “spent output” on the blockchain. SOPR takes that spent output and calculates a simple ratio: the price of Bitcoin when those coins were sold, divided by the price of Bitcoin when those same coins were originally acquired.
SOPR = Price when sold ÷ Price when originally acquired
If the result is above 1.0, the person who moved those coins sold them at a profit — they received more than they paid. If the result is below 1.0, they sold at a loss. If it’s exactly 1.0, they broke even. Across thousands of transactions per day, SOPR gives you an aggregate read on whether the market as a whole is realizing profits or losses at any given moment.
What Is STH-SOPR and Why Is It Different?
Regular SOPR covers every coin on the network — coins that have been held for one day and coins that have been held for ten years. That broad view is useful, but it blurs together two groups of market participants who behave very differently: short-term traders who react quickly to price movements, and long-term holders who rarely move their coins regardless of what the market does.
STH-SOPR — Short-Term Holder SOPR — applies the same calculation but filters it to include only coins that have been held for fewer than 155 days. Everything older than 155 days is excluded.
Why 155 days specifically? Glassnode’s research identified 155 days as the statistical threshold that best separates two distinct behavioral cohorts. Coins that have been held longer than 155 days almost never get sold during market corrections — their holders have demonstrated strong conviction regardless of price action. Coins held for fewer than 155 days are far more sensitive to price movements. The people holding them are more likely to panic during crashes and more likely to chase pumps during rallies.
By isolating this younger cohort, STH-SOPR gives you a much cleaner read on the “fast money” in the market — the traders and newer buyers whose behavior drives short-term price dynamics.
The 1.0 Level: Why It’s the Most Important Line on the Chart
The 1.0 level on STH-SOPR is the breakeven point for short-term holders. When STH-SOPR is above 1.0, the average short-term holder moving coins is doing so at a profit. When it’s below 1.0, they’re moving coins at a loss.
This sounds simple, but the behavioral implications are significant.
When short-term holders are comfortably profitable (STH-SOPR well above 1.0 in a sustained way), it indicates that newer buyers who entered the market recently are sitting on gains. This is the normal state during healthy bull market conditions. People are buying, prices are rising, and recent purchasers are in profit.
When STH-SOPR drops below 1.0, it means the most recent wave of buyers is now underwater. They paid more than the current price. This creates a specific market dynamic: these holders face a choice between selling at a loss and accepting the pain, or holding and hoping for recovery. When many of them choose to sell — panic selling — it accelerates price declines and creates the capitulation conditions that historically precede recoveries.
The crossover back above 1.0 — from loss territory back to profit — is the signal that capitulation has run its course. The weak hands who were going to sell have sold. The buyers who absorbed that selling are now in profit. Checkonchain’s STH-SOPR chart shows this pattern repeating across every major Bitcoin market cycle.
How to Read STH-SOPR in Different Market Conditions
The same reading means very different things depending on the broader market context, which is why STH-SOPR is best used alongside other metrics rather than in isolation.
In a bull market, when STH-SOPR dips to 1.0 and bounces, that’s typically a strong buy-the-dip signal. Price pulled back enough to shake out weak hands, STH-SOPR touched breakeven, buyers stepped in, and the uptrend resumed. This pattern repeated throughout the 2020-2021 bull run — each dip that brought STH-SOPR back to 1.0 was followed by a resumption of the uptrend.
In a bear market, the 1.0 level flips from support to resistance. Short-term holders who bought at higher prices are sitting on losses. Every time price bounces toward their cost basis (pushing STH-SOPR back toward 1.0), many of them sell to break even or minimize losses. This creates a ceiling on recoveries. The 1.0 level becomes a wall that price struggles to push through sustainably.
Persistent readings well below 1.0 indicate deep capitulation — a market where short-term holders are selling at significant losses. Historically, sustained STH-SOPR readings below 0.95 have marked the most extreme phases of Bitcoin bear markets. The 2022 collapse following the FTX implosion pushed STH-SOPR into this territory, as did the March 2020 crash.
Historical Examples That Show the Pattern
The March 2020 crash is the clearest modern example. When COVID fears sent Bitcoin from $9,000 to $3,800 in days, STH-SOPR collapsed well below 1.0 as panic sellers flooded the market. The sustained recovery began as STH-SOPR climbed back above 1.0 and held — confirming that capitulation selling had exhausted itself. What followed was one of Bitcoin’s most significant bull runs in history.
The May 2021 crash, which took Bitcoin from $58,000 to $30,000, showed the same dynamic. STH-SOPR broke hard below 1.0 during the sell-off. The local bottom was confirmed when it began recovering back toward breakeven. Buyers who stepped in while STH-SOPR was in loss territory were well-positioned for the subsequent recovery to new all-time highs.
The 2022 bear market was more extended and painful. STH-SOPR spent months below 1.0 as successive waves of short-term holders capitulated — first after the Terra-Luna collapse in May, then again after FTX in November. The difference between a crash and a prolonged bear market is often how long STH-SOPR stays below 1.0. Brief dips below with quick recoveries tend to mark corrections within bull markets. Extended time below 1.0 with repeated failed attempts to reclaim it tends to mark genuine bear markets.
What STH-SOPR Is Telling Us Right Now
The current situation is directly relevant to where Bitcoin stands in February 2026. After the historic $3.2 billion realized loss event on February 5th — which sent STH-SOPR well below 1.0 — the metric has been slowly recovering. On February 16th, STH-SOPR crossed back above 1.0 for the first time in a week, a development highlighted by onchain analyst Axel Adler Jr. as a potentially positive shift — though he noted that sustainability remained uncertain.
The key caveat is what’s happening with MVRV simultaneously. As of mid-February, MVRV remains approximately 17% below its historical norm, meaning that while short-term holders have recovered to breakeven, the broader market structure still shows significant unrealized losses among a wider cohort of holders. This divergence — STH-SOPR recovering while MVRV lags — suggests the immediate capitulation selling has cleared, but the structural overhang hasn’t fully resolved. Every bounce toward higher prices is likely to meet sellers who are still underwater on their broader holdings and looking to reduce losses.
This is exactly the kind of nuanced reading that STH-SOPR enables. It’s not a binary signal — it tells you where one specific group of market participants stands at any given moment, which helps you build a more complete picture when combined with other metrics.
STH-SOPR vs. LTH-SOPR: The Other Half of the Picture
STH-SOPR’s counterpart is LTH-SOPR — Long-Term Holder SOPR, which covers coins held for more than 155 days. The contrast between the two tells an important story about market dynamics.
Long-term holders almost always show an LTH-SOPR well above 1.0, simply because they’ve held through multiple price cycles and their average cost basis is typically well below current prices. When LTH-SOPR drops meaningfully toward 1.0, it means even the most convicted Bitcoin holders are approaching their cost basis — a rare and historically significant signal that indicates a much deeper bear market than short-term turbulence.
When LTH-SOPR falls below 1.0 — meaning long-term holders are selling at a loss — that has historically marked the absolute floor of Bitcoin bear markets. It happened briefly in 2015, in 2018, and during the depths of the 2022 collapse. Each time, it marked the final capitulation before a sustained recovery. Right now, LTH-SOPR remains well above 1.0, meaning long-term holders are not capitulating. That’s a meaningful distinction from the genuine bear market conditions those extreme readings have historically marked.
How to Check STH-SOPR for Free
Several free tools offer STH-SOPR charts with no subscription required. CryptoQuant’s STH-SOPR chart is one of the most widely used, offering clean visualization with historical context. Newhedge’s STH-SOPR chart provides a free public view of the metric. ChartInspect’s STH-SOPR tool includes additional filtering options. Checkonchain covers STH-SOPR as part of its broader profit/loss suite, which also includes the LTH counterpart for comparison.
For the most actionable use, check STH-SOPR weekly rather than daily. The daily reading can be noisy. What you’re looking for is the sustained trend — is it consistently above 1.0 and holding? Consistently below? Or bouncing around the 1.0 level in a way that suggests uncertainty? The trend over 7-14 days tells you far more than any single reading.
Putting It Together With Other Metrics
STH-SOPR is most powerful when used alongside two other metrics covered on Onchain Decoded. The first is the Thermocap Multiple, which provides the long-term cycle context — where are we relative to historical tops and bottoms? STH-SOPR then tells you what the most recent buyers are experiencing within that broader context. A low Thermocap Multiple combined with STH-SOPR recovering from below 1.0 is one of the strongest confluence signals in Bitcoin’s onchain toolkit.
The second is the MVRV Z-Score, which measures how far market cap has deviated from realized cap on a historical basis. When MVRV Z-Score is low (as it is now at 0.5-0.8) and STH-SOPR is recovering toward and above 1.0, the two metrics together suggest that both the overall market and the short-term cohort are emerging from stress conditions — a historically favorable setup. When they diverge — as they partly are now, with STH-SOPR crossing 1.0 but MVRV still below historical norms — it signals a more cautious, transitional environment rather than a clear all-clear.
No single metric tells the complete story. STH-SOPR is one essential piece of a broader onchain framework. We track it every week alongside MVRV, exchange reserves, and ETF flows in the Onchain Pulse, published every Monday. Subscribe below to get it in your inbox.
STH-SOPR is one piece of a complete onchain picture. On the valuation side, the MVRV Z-Score measures how stretched the entire market is above its aggregate cost basis, while Realized Price gives you the dollar level where every major bear market has historically found its floor. The NVT Ratio provides a usage-based valuation check — is Bitcoin’s market cap justified by actual transaction volume? On the supply side, Exchange Reserves tell you whether coins are flowing into selling position or being withdrawn to cold storage. Miner health, tracked via the Hash Ribbon, adds context on whether structural forced selling from miners is present or resolved. For accumulation zone identification, see 6 Onchain Signals That Suggest Smart Money Is Buying. All terms are defined in the Bitcoin Onchain Glossary. For a step-by-step routine using these tools, see the Onchain Analysis Tutorial and the 10 Best Free Bitcoin Onchain Tools.
Sources
- CryptoQuant — Bitcoin Short-Term Holder SOPR Chart
- Glassnode — STH-SOPR Chart and 155-Day Threshold Research
- Checkonchain — SOPR and Profit/Loss Onchain Analytics Suite
- Newhedge — Bitcoin Short-Term Holder SOPR Chart
- ChartInspect — STH-SOPR Chart
- Blockchain Reporter — Bitcoin SOPR Surpasses 1.0 as Short-Term Holders Return to Profit (Feb 16, 2026)
- Bitcoin Magazine Pro — Short-Term Holder Realized Price Chart
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research.
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The information provided in this article is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, investment, or trading advice. Onchain News does not provide recommendations to buy, sell, or hold any asset, and nothing here should be taken as a guarantee of future performance. Always conduct your own research and consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions. Cryptocurrency markets are volatile and you are responsible for your own risk.
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